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check out this related article. I think, therefore that we should conserve as many characters as possible. It's like people named Matt or Elliott who use 2 't's - I mean that's pretty frickin' gready. Wouldn't it sound the same with just 1 't'? Why are you people hoarding?

Most people don't realize that midget obesity is a serious problem and that Adobe is just stepping up here in the best interests of those little people affected. Macromedia has flaunted its use of Flabbed Midgets for a long time now and it's not fair to us or them that they can benefit from Adobe's considerable R&D expense regarding these short, fat people -

oh wait, what did you say? Trapped gidget? Oh, tabbed widgets. Right.

Forget it.


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Hey, no one likes the damn Windows media player, but can't you see the point in getting the message out to those who need it most - those with the Windows media player?

What's the point in preaching Linux to a Linux only media set? It defeats the whole purpose. However, this seems to be more and more the attitude of "open" systems.

"Hey, let's convince them to use our operating system by not using any of their file formats and make remarks about them when they ask for information in those formats."

It's the high school cafeteria attitude, finally brought to software!

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Didn't this thing just end yesterday?

From the text of this post it looks like all this stuff is live.

<Drunken Undershirt Speech>Maybe if Slashdot wasn't owned by the damn multinational media and was still a small site like it used to be back when it sucked, then now it wouldn't suck as much as my pet pig on this here tree bark.</DUS>

Nice.

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An excellent analysis of the probability of success of this experiment.

These questions are of interest to us all, and I guess they must be because at least 1/3 of the stories on here are related to these issues.

Authors seem to have it both the best and the worst on the interenet currently. The best because it's easy to distribute their content economically and the baseline machine / internet connection can handle their medium easily. The worst because they're the poor cousin on the bandwidth requirements scale so their stuff is also easiest to rip off. I hope something's worked out so we can all benefit.

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I think the comments posted so far are missing the point, this is not simply a search engine system being open sourced but a content management system.

This is a super important piece of software for a major website to have available for free. Sure you can serve up a zillion hits with Apache, but how do you manage the pipeline of getting structured content from writers and artists onto that site in a timely and efficient manner?

It's a thorny problem and the solutions available now are very expensive and I hear not that great. This coupled with Apache and the free XML tools that are out there now should combine to make a killer, free, web suite a reality.

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I was just wondering, since the Seti@Home dudes are always talking about how they need to keep the source code under control to keep any semblance of scientific integrity, something which I think makes sense, does the porting of the block cruncher to other systems affect this goal at all?

For example, if there's a rounding error in one of the floating point libraries for whatever OS you're compiling for, let's just take the common example of a 6 processor embedded PCI card, wouldn't that invalidate the results from that computer as much as the Seti@Home source being modified?


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No matter what the performance results of new ATI products, you can pretty much guarantee that it will be at least 2 driver releases after the actual release of the card when you will be able to play any games with stability, and you will also be pretty much guaranteed that the card will NEVER get it's drivers to the state where everything works satisfactorily.

ATI has burned me too many times by abandoning my card before the drivers get mature enough to be stable and consequently I won't be buying any of their stuff again.

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Mouse is an orgnaization that gets computers into schools in and around New York City.

They need all sorts of people, proprammers, networking people, etc. I'm not sure whether they have operations in other parts of the country as well.

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And my vote for worst processor name in current production: IBM's Power3-III!

Jeez, get some imagination ya nerds.

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The problem with open source initiatives seems to with creativity, and this hurts in game developement the most.

I have yet to see an open source project that is not a clone or a close relative of something that already exists in the world. Perhaps it's done better, but that's not the point.

Open source breeds innovation, not invention and in the world of game design this is death.

My current theory is that new ideas need alot of high-bandwidth discussions, i.e. face to face meetings, to hash out and transfer the idea from one brain to another. Open source projects rarely have this luxury and so perhaps are forced into pointing their efforts at a well understood problem.

Summary: I find it unlikely that an amazing open source game will emerge under the current community conditions.

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I hate to point out the obvious, but I've seen alot of posts here saying we've got a few milestones to go before the feature set is complete, and then speed optimizations begin.

This does not make sense.

IE has something like 70% of the browser market now, mainly because it just browses, nothing else.

Mozilla Team: Please consider freezing the features right now. You already have the best rendering engine, prove it by making the necessary optimizations. Then we can all have a prominent UI based opensource app to point to as a success.

"Stop eating your own dog food, and finish the damn browser."

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Is anyone else sick of daily updates on this trial when any actual penalties or remedies won't be in effect for another 7 years or so, allowing for the proper appeals?

This is not another boring "Slasher should cover more " posts, it's in the media at large.

Realtime news isn't that important.

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This will be interesting as most cell phone pricing packages charge you for an email message received on your phone whether you want it or not. What will happen when they let through 300 messages from a worm cruising around and you get a $150 phone bill.

Spam from these sorts of viruses is irritating when you're on a flat rate internet connection, it's gonna be a serious issue when you pay per message.

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You seem like the kind of person who would have laughed at the first computers and stuck to his handy mechanical calculator.

And of course having not read the articles, you add a bunch of e-commerce bashing in there for good measure.

Nice work.

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You have NO IDEA how good our banking system is until you move to the States like I did.

Take those service fees, double them and then remove every service that is normally provided by the bank and you're almost there. Maybe add in a little lost deposit or expired bank card action and you've pretty much got it.


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Ok, a two parter:

As I understood it weather models are a fairly hard thing to paralleliz (how the hell do you spell that?) because of the interdependence of pieces of the model. This would seem to me to make a Beowulf cluster a tough choice as it's inter-CPU bandwidth is pretty low right? And that's why I thought most weather prediction places chose high end super-computers because of their custom and expensive inter-CPU I/O?

Second part: Is weather prediction getting any better? Everything I've read about dynamic systems says that prediction past a certain level of detail or timeframe is impossible. Is that true?

Disclaimer: I might be dumb.

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For some reason I've managed to get an advance copy of Microsoft's responses to the questions:

To Mark D. Robins,

Thank you for your interest in our proprietary protocols products. The answers to your inquiries are as follows:

1. We claimed protections mostly because we didn't think you'd notice. It pains us to realize that you were one of the few people who actually took the time to read the license agreement before clicking.

2. If you notice, our product is in fact entitled Kerberoos, which is almost completely different from the product you refer to as Kerberos. Our product is in reality a tasty, but proprietary children's cereal. Maybe you've seen our mascot Kangy the Kerberoo?

3. We deny the existence of the internet.

4. Microsoft has taken measures such as writing you this letter and threatening other people. One time on the street a guy from our marketing department made fun of a kid whom he suspected of distributing our Kerberoos brand cereal, the child began crying.

5. We have a "rewards" program that pays any person who turns in a friend for unauthorized use of Kerberoos. So far, we have paid out over $73 in rewards.

6. Most of the detrimental impact is to our already fragile emotions. The justice department has been very mean to us and we're in a pretty rough place right now. You guys showing up and just spilling all our secrets isn't helping.

7. We've found the prospective purchasers of Microsoft products like to know as little as possible before making a purchase. Did you know that we're friends with Jay Leno? Yup, now here's your copy of Office.

8. You guys suck and we hate you. Stop bringing up the damn lawsuit 'cause it sucks to. You guys are just the suckiest sucks ever.

I hope this clarifies the situation and are position. Don't hesitate to contact us by telegram or pigeon if you have any more questions.


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As has been mentioned before, Corel has roughly 5 months of operating capital in the bank, and needed the merge most immediately to acquire Borland's cash reserves.

So here's the situation: Little money left, a ways to go before their Linux investment pays off (even longer without the merger), declining market share in core products like Draw, stagnant sales in Word Perfect office.

Did I miss anything? Maybe this will destroy the part of Corel's brain that contiually wants to compete with Microsoft in their core areas, and get them to focus on something that might make some money.

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This type of work is definately interesting and has produced some good results. If you are interested, definately check out the references at the bottom of the page, they are some of the defining work in this area. For your convenience I've linked up a few here (for some reason they're not linked from the actual site):

Karl Sims stuff

His Original Paper
Some cool pictures and more links

That should get you started.


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There's alot of debate for and against standards in the Linux community and in the open source community in general.

Arguments against: Stifles innovation.
Arguments for: Prevents fragmentation.

My take is that certain administrative OS things should be standardized just to make our lives easier. I mean who really cares whether files go in /usr or /local, just pick one! Let's leave the room for innovation in things that really matter and make sure that simple things like deploying applications are as easy as possible.

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Man, I hope Be keeps enough resource on BeOS. They're almost at the point of being a solid alternative for music and multimedia applications, something which Windows ain't. I would hate to see them stick it out this far and then not put enough muscle behind the last 10ft of the race.

By the way, has any company that has decided to focus on embedded applications or OSes ever been successful? I saw so many of those "thin client" type focus announcements, and then usually the company just implodes.

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Not sure about that plan. From the article: "But HDTV has been slow to take off. Reception is spotty..." Does that sound like the kinda thing you'd want to trust your data to?

"Sorry dear, no email during the thunderstorm."

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Looks like after that they've decided to change to the "doh" in .com.

[drum hit]

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It's bad enough to go out and see "28 Days" by accident and then regret you ever went. It'll be even worse to spend 10 hours downloading it, watch it in a 1" x 2" window, regret ever seeing it, then accidentally click on it again when you're trying to shut down, have to pay for it again and then watch it again cause you feel guilty about wasting money.

So in short, it sounds like a good system that will become viable sometime in the future, perhaps as far away as the "Year 2000."

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I've been trying to talk to my fax machine for weeks, but it keeps giving me the cold shoulder.

I think its my accent.

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Coming from Canada (Toronto) and now living and working in NYC, I can say that there is not alot of Java going on in Canada right now. Not only that, but Canadian companies continue to hold on to their outdated human resources type hiring policies which slows everything down.

If you get a good headhunter in NY or most places in Cali, if you're at all good with Java you should have a job in few days.

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IANAL, but the other day I was phoning a lady and making a modem noise with my nose to achieve manual DoS, I thought - "hey, is this legal?"


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To what extent is the spread of OSS compatible with capitalism? Most of OSS is made possible by companies that pay us to write other stuff, thereby keeping us alive to write the free variety.

Could you envision an extreme situation where OSS becomes too successful and it is difficult to make a living in the software business?

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There's always so much griping on these threads I thought I'd just say that I think this piece is Slashdot at its best. A well thought out, well linked article by someone who actually knows something about what he's talking about, and someone I wouldn't normally be able to hear from.

Worth another month of Trolls and MicroSux posts for sure.

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Women on the internet can only be a good thing. There is nothing worse than a ton of guys hanging around and creating the equivalent of the nasty bachelor pad with 7 roommates type of environment.

It is because women and men are different that I value their viewpoint and contributions. I have a feeling that even the average open source mailing list would have an entirely different feel if the gender ratio were closer to 50/50.

It is up to us long time male denizens to make everyone feel welcome in our little communities. I think it would make everything that much more interesting.

Then again, if you browse this thread at -1 I bet you'd find a different feeling entirely.

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...Thinking Machines Corp would still be around, and Danny Hillis wouldn't be wasting his time dicking around with a huge dumb clock.

If Mr. Hillis is the genius you say he is, then perhaps he has a better idea of what might be important in the future than you or I.

Personally I think he realized that there might be more important problems facing Humans than the speed of database queries.

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Or turn on frustration mode so that the kiddies have to search through 15 minutes of menus just to find the last damn bendy piece, then they find out its stuck to a little black flat piece and they have to wiggle the mouse, then bite one of the buttons for 7 minutes to get it off.

Lego should be covering my medical expenses, I estimate I lost 70% of my tooth enamel as a child trying to free that last damn bendy piece, and there's no way my kids are going to have it any other way.

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I think there is a knee-jerk tendency among some OSS proponents to immediately not trust a companies motives if they don't immediatly give up all control over their most prized possessions.

While I might not agree with many of the things Sun has done, most notably their initial handling of the Blackdown porting team, I do see merit in some of their arguments regarding Java. There are very few languages, and even fewer successful ones, that have a truly open standards process. More importantly, it doesn't matter to most developers anyways. A developer only cares that he has ready access to a C(++) compiler, and that some percentage of the rest of the world is using that language along with him/her. About the only time that developer would notice that the language's spec was open was if it fragmented and became difficult to use.

A benevolent dictator is a very useful thing, Linus has shown that with the kernel. Whether or not Sun is benevolent is really what the argument is about.

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Although this is not an annoucement with the kind of importance like Java being opened, it is an important testing of the waters for Sun and should be encouraged rather than flamed.

To expect a company that has spent 20 odd years in fierce competition to suddenly drop all that and "get" the idea of giving stuff away is asking too much. It'll be done in steps, and we should support and offer useful criticism rather than just dismissal.

The only thing left to see is if they actually do it, being as the actual release is still two months away. Sun has changed it's course before, hopefully they don't do it here.

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I was just wondering this the other day - are there any commercial quality open source 3D animation packages in development at this time? I haven't really ever heard anyone talking about this.

I'd also be interested in hearing about just any free alternatives too.


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The rumours are true, this movie is brutal.

I've tried all sorts of ways to justify what seems to be an unrepentantly bad movie, but it just makes me angry to think about it. There are lots of things that reeked in the movie (dialogue, realism, music...) but let me sum it up with this:

A computer generated alien who sheds a single tear for his race.

Doesn't get much worse than that.

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Ok everyone calm down.

There still remains the chance that these "water canals" could be nothing more than an underground subway system for a race of super-intelligent beings.

Let's not fly off the handle and start talking water before we're sure it's not just something simple.

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I find it ridiculous the number of people on here that are simultaneously deriding this MS X-Box thing as a closed product, while pumping up sony and its playstation line.

Sony is the king of closed and proprietary standards (or at least non-standard) that it refuses to open, and refuses to let drop. Memory sticks, mini-discs and all manner of crazy ports for their machines.

I like Sony's products myself, but only because they allow fun games on their platforms and generally have a good design sense.

In some way a more moral company than Microsoft? Unlikely.


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Doesn't that hippocratic oath that doctors take when they become licensed to practice say something about doing everything in their power to help patients?

How do Doctors employed by companies reconcile this fundamental aspect of being a doctor, with withholding information to protect their company's bottom line?

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It's my take here that Mr. Coates' motives in this could be very personal. The article states that he owns 3,005,440 shares of Inprise and if Corel's previous acquisition record is to be applied here then those shares could be worth very little in a year or two.

Corel has a strong history of losing to Microsoft in any area in which it decides to go head to head. Probably Mr. Coates believes that his, and his company's interests are best served not in a turf war with Microsoft, but by servicing both camps with much needed multi platform development tools (Borland) and application architechtures (Visigenic).

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I still find it kind of odd that Linux people are really getting into the convention thing like every other area of computing. Does Linux, being almost entirely developed by people working seperately and communicating instantaneously still make it seem useful to all get together in some warehouse for a couple days and get free pamphlets?

I do not doubt the social reasons for these things, it's great to meet the people you yell at on Usenet, I just wonder as to what some groups are now touting as the business usefulness of these conferences.

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Yup, excellent points there.

I would agree that it's always going to be good to have the config files just be plain text editable. Build the GUIs on top of that. Perhaps the XML format idea being tossed about is worth a look, it seems to be the best of both worlds.

Cut and Paste, perhaps a bad example. I'm so used to the Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V combo now I think I make alot of mistakes because of that. However, there should be a standard KEY stroke for cut paste in Linux. In Netscape its Alt-C, Alt-V. Everywhere else, its select then middle mouse button (which can be good and bad). I just want things to be consistent in terms of look and feel across applications in a specific window manager. It really helps in learning a new program quickly. By the way, I love the new Sawmill window manager for Gnome. It's probably the first GUI I prefer over Windows.

I guess my final point could be misinterpreted. First, I don't think anyone is claiming that the Linux kernel is anything but super-solid. However, as we get further and further away from that things seem to get more and more unstable. Some examples in terms of just handy utilities that are fairly solid elsewhere: GnomeICU (much better with new release), Gnome-napster, KV-Irc (or whatever its called), and some others. True, the older a project gets (given that it is popular), the more stable it gets in general. However, that is not guaranteed as the effort still has to be put in to find what are probably really boring problems with a program. Just because something goes open source doesn't mean they'll be any useful development.

As for compiling goes, yup its super useful if you know whats going on, and yup binary packages are really common nowadays. Alot of the time though, you are expected to be able to recompile to fix any problems.

Ahh its all tradeoffs anyway right? I love alot of these advantages and accept the complexity that comes with them. I'd love to see the two goals of configurability and ease of use both be achieved.

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Linux is not easy to use.

KDE and Gnome are easier to use. If Linux truely wants to be on the average desktop there has to be at least these simple issues addressed:

1. Interface consistency.
2. GUI configuration of system.
3. Target audience for most apps.

Now a brief expansion (coming from a semi-new Linux user, long time computer user):

1. First, it is fine to have different window managers. Just make them at least independently consistent. The obvious example - cut and paste, different in every situation and exteremely frustrating and inefficient.
2. There have been important strides in this area in a very short period of time, but the common advice is: "Edit the scripts, who knows what [utility] will do to them." This is no good.
3. Linux developers target their apps for a Linux Savvy audience. Bugs are expected, bad interfaces with nasty widgets are expected and in most cases a compile is expected. Most computer users don't know what "compile" means. Package managers help alot, it sure helped me, but it won't help the guy deciding on whether to get that iMac or not.

Linux can be on the desktop, but does it want to be? It's really up to all of us I guess, and as soon as its not and its up to Corel or RedHat or something, then its probably not worth pushing Linux anymore.

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For Linux to really get onto the desktop, everyone agrees that you need to have a great office suite that is interoperable with MS Office, a good browser, a nice windowing system, etc. When we look at the progress made, all those major points are well under way or in hand, yet the instantaneous transition of the user base to Linux has yet to happen, for the desktop at least.

Why? Because its still insanely hard to use. I don't know why I feel I need to worry about this being called flamebait or whatever on here, but I really believe its the truth. Lurking right underneath the beautiful levels of window managers we always see screenshots for is the world of rc.d scripts, ifconfig, nfs and all the other stuff.

I know computers pretty well and its taken me weeks to get at all proficient in Linux, and just the other night I couldn't get the damn floppy disk to unmount and I had no idea why!

My idea: Let's each work to make Linux the best tool for their area of need and let others worry about whether its worth it for them to adopt. At some point it will, but guessing what the average user wants is not going to get us closer to being on the computer in the living room.

Please comment, I'd love to hear other strategies.


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"...researchers announced that the new sophisticated chips could be on the market as early as next year and would have a wider range of more powerful flavours. The Sour cream and onion variety will be released at 9x its original flavour, while BBQ should be over 11x. Researchers say that the flavour multiple should increase rapidly as they move to a 0.1 mm ruffle process.

Hostess' law states that flavour will double every 18 months while number of chips in a bag will half. Researchers have been worried lately that they may have been reaching the physical limits of flavour packing, but these newly announced bionic technologies should allow for further improvements."


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It seems that in the simplest configuration you do not need either the Gateway or the Access thing. Read here for some info, along with a link to a pretty large PDF which is the user manual for the WaveLan PCI card.

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A good point, I remember back in I think '97 when there were some chips in development to do just that, I believe Motorola and IBM were the two major proponents, but I could be wrong.

However, this example only illustrates the truism that any resources directed at specific hardware implementations would be better off being directed at making a general CPU faster. These chips don't exist today because Intel and AMD have pushed the envelope so far that they just aren't necessary, or couldn't keep up.

(For the record, I am a Java programmer so this isn't an anti-Java bias speaking).

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Related to all of this: does anyone have any idea when the source to the new "Mobile Linux" code that Linux developed will be released?

Because its based on Linux, the GPL says they do need to release it right?


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Ahh, the Russians have had these capabilities for years, its called "clay pottery" and involves the realtime molding of clay by a team of russians who hide behind your monitor.

The U.S. could have had this working long ago if they hadn't cut their spending on high speed kiln research.

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